The Entrepreneur and his romance with Failure

The person who cannot coexist with Failure, with losses, and frustration, is not enabled to function successfully as an Entrepreneur. In the world of entrepreneurship, victories are grams of gold among tons of mud and sand, and it takes a colossal effort to separate one thing from the other.

If the miner fights every day with the mud and the cold, he does so because he recognizes that the value of the prize exceeds all costs and the rest is the natural environment where the treasure is hidden. Each ton of mud is not a representation of failure, it is the input from whose process the golden metal emerges. If gold weren’t so rare and hard to find, it wouldn’t be so valuable either.

This environment is similar to that of the Entrepreneur: the expected result is like that elusive gold nugget in the dunghill.

Many people undertake with a false mirage as north, they visualize the prize without taking into account the difficulties that populate the path that leads to it. They are willing to make every effort to achieve their dream but they are unaware that the goal is not achieved only with work, it is achieved mainly by the ability to process failure and frustration, tons of both for every gram of benefit.

If the Entrepreneur does not know how to Lose, he is not qualified to Win, because Triumph is just one of the contests in which he has not lost and merit is never among the “winners” but among those who know how to lose. Big men are not those stereotypes associated with genius and cunning to achieve their goals, they are people with an admirable ability to accept adversity, process it and use it for their purposes. As a living example of the judgment of Eden, these men achieve their goals by wiping away blood, sweat, and tears.

This does not mean that other tasks in life do not demand the same or become less “worthy” because they have different processes, it is clear that nothing in life is achieved without effort, the subtle difference lies in the fact that the Entrepreneur will have to process everything. this is essentially JUST. The Entrepreneur lacks that “safety net” that provides collective responsibility or that which is linked to the responsibility of someone else.

If something definitively characterizes his work, it is that the burden of facing all the “costs” falls on him, and only on him. In essence, no one shares the frustration and grief. Sympathy and “solidarity” can populate his environment, but the responsibility for the result is exclusively linked to him.

The Entrepreneur must realize that the best teachers and the highest quality guidance that he will find along the way will not necessarily come from that “supportive environment” that surrounds him. That environment lacks the necessary empathy to identify with the experiences he has along the way. It is precisely the Problems, the Frustrations, the Losses, and the Failures that will never lie to you and who will best teach you the solutions and remedies.

Failure is a teacher of much more value than Success, adversity forges character as few things do, and problem-solving leads human beings to wisdom.

While for the rest of the people, all setbacks only call for anguish and condemnation, for the Entrepreneur they must be decisive allies. On the one hand, exceptional benefits can be extracted from them, but on the other hand, they are unavoidable. Problems and adversity in life are inevitable, as well in the human being in general and to a greater extent in the Entrepreneur, therefore they are either assumed as a stumbling block or as a stone that builds the foundation. In the life of entrepreneurship, failure is routine and success is extraordinary, problems are a constant and the positive is an exception.

It is not necessary to think that the Entrepreneur “wishes” that the tests and setbacks come and even less that he enjoys them, they will simply appear, with the same certainty of light that breaks the shadows of each dawn, like mud, sand, and the water that awaits the miner every day. They will always play the role of depriving him of his prize, of making his task difficult, they will seduce him at every moment to give up the fight and many times they will succeed.

Resisting these forces with a raised fist and bare chest is unlikely to achieve a good result. Testing manhood and courage before them is not the smartest thing to do. That of having a “stomach” or “nerves of steel” applies better to a Firefighter than to an Entrepreneur, because no one can have the “endurance” necessary to face adversity for very long periods, and entrepreneurship is not a matter of one working day.

To interact with Problems and Failure requires more Intelligence than Character, more skill than strength, and more energy than power. The Strength of adversity can never be faced with its equivalent strength, the human being simply lacks that range. But he has his Intelligence at hand, the ability to discern and interpose faith, patience, good cheer, and perseverance along the way.

The life of an Entrepreneur is not at all easy when these things are not understood and assimilated, just as the life of our ancestors subject to the rigors of nature was surely not. What would have happened to our species if the first human beings had only dedicated themselves to “enduring” or facing “by force” the natural elements that punished them? How do you win the game against lightning or rain? To the cold or the heat? His intelligence prevailed to adapt to the phenomena and conclude by using them in his favor, force or power had nothing to do with it. Today we can observe from the pleasant warmth of our houses the snow falling around us, today the sun nourishes us with electrical energy. The human being has come to conquer the elements to use them in his favor, and he has done so by resorting to his Intellect, not his Courage or his Courage.

Faced with losses, failures, problems, and adversity, the Entrepreneur also has a challenge of Conquest and not one of stoic resistance. A Conquest challenge that in any case does not imply submission, but rather that ability to get the opposite to play for one’s benefit.

Many things of value are at stake in the Entrepreneur’s interaction with the conflict: the success between them or the fact of achieving results despite adversity, but above all the possibility of being at PEACE, in emotional balance and with tranquility in the soul. These factors suffer high punishment when the Entrepreneur does not conclude by “conquering” adversity. When the man goes bankrupt, the venture goes bankrupt and the story ends there.

No one offered flowers at this party and it is bad for those who arrive carrying pots. The path of the Entrepreneur is not easy and there is little use in trying to “decorate” it. Losses will exist, failure will knock on doors many times, and frustration will be part of the diet. The important thing is not to resist it, but to intelligence, to understand that tests are teachers who do not lie and that adversity can be conquered for good.

Finally, all this will also help the Entrepreneur to stand before the mirror and finally determine if he has “fighting nails” because it is always worth realizing if the call for this task was a mistake. Who at the time decided to embark on a trip, may realize on the way that the demands of the journey do not match expectations or capacity, and in this case, it is best to stop and change path. This is the ultimate test of courage.

• If the person who undertook it is a person who does not properly process the fact of Losing, the trip must be stopped.
• If you are a person who values ​​calm life routines at a high price, it is better to change your path.
• If you’re a person who believes that success is a ship to be fired at, you’d better channel that energy elsewhere.
• If you think that genius is a greater cousin of intelligence, you are called to another game.
• If you are doing it just to earn money, it is better to evaluate another option, because on this trip you will also lose money.

The miner indeed does what he does for the love of gold, but that passion leads him to develop a romance with the other elements, those that he must conquer to take his prize. He understands that mud and sand are what he loves the most and that is why he understands them, processes them, and treats them with care. He extracts the gold from them, and takes it away, with immense patience and skill.

Likewise, the Entrepreneur must have a romance with failure to extract from it what he wants: victory, the dream realized, the vision achieved.

When you see the close relationship between failure and victory, you will come to treat them equally. And probably behind this small detail you will not only find a valuable comparative advantage, but also PEACE, because whoever does not value failure and success in the same way is like the one who begins an endless journey to find the treasure that supposedly exists at the bottom of of the rainbow